The following is a video perspective on the blog post “Don’t Confuse a Benchmark with a Goal,” released last week:
Organization Horsepower
Thinking Like a Motorcycle Racing Team
Tag: human capital
My biggest hobby outside of work is building musical instruments. I don’t have a woodworking or lutherie background. In fact, I’ve never taken a single class on either, and my dad is more shade tree mechanic than wood worker. So my instruments are generally pretty primitive.
I started building instruments out of cigar boxes. The practice of building instruments out of found objects is nothing new, in fact there is a long history of improvising to create something that you couldn’t afford for less than the cost to acquire that item. If you don’t have anything good to work from, then use what you have and improvise.
While this is a rewarding hobby for me, and it keeps me sharp in a lot of areas in my business life, my HR clients are not dealing with “found objects”. They don’t need to, and can’t afford to improvise on their talent to meet the needs of their companies. They are more mature at the practice of HR than a proverbial cigar box guitar.
The thing about learning slowly through experience alone is that while it takes a while, the journey is fairly rewarding. But the costs to get the experience are astronomical. Part of that cost is time, some of it is materials, tools have been a major expense, and some of it is lost to mistakes made.
As my skills have improved, the instruments I build take more time,
and the cost of materials I used have escalated rapidly.
Measure twice, cut once is an over-used cliché, especially when we are talking about ruining a 99 cent 2×4 that is part of the unseen interior hidden by drywall. But when I’m using a $100 set of spalted curly maple (as seen in the picture to the right), that over-used cliché suddenly means something. I measure multiple times from multiple directions because there are real consequences if I make a mistake. But it’s more than the cost of wood. That piece of wood directly determines how the instrument sounds, how it plays, and how attractive the end result is. It also determines, if I choose to sell it, how much I can sell that finished instrument for.
Companies spend more on their people than any other expense on the balance sheet, yet too many of them treat people like a 99 cent 2×4 and not like a beautiful set of unique one-of-a-kind wood that directly affects their profitability. That’s not to say that they treat those employees poorly, it’s that they fail to measure, let alone twice, what the real value of that person to the organization really is.
This is also more than a “cut” metaphor; this isn’t about “staff reduction” as much as it’s about being smart about how people are applied to the end result.
I want to build better guitars. If you want a better HR function, measurement that means something
needs to be part of your approach. You will never improve without it.
Media 1 is pushing hard into the Human Capital Improvement space with SharePoint-based offerings for cohort learning (leadership and sales) and Onboarding. To learn more about the concerns and needs of people involved in talent management and development, we decided to attend MediaTec’s Strategies 2011 conference in Half Moon Bay, CA.
What a fantastic location and a great conference filled with key learning around diversity, inclusion, and techniques for managing and developing the workforce. However, the concept that I want to focus in on is that of employee engagement. Engagement isn’t a term that I have used a lot before now, but it’s one ingrained in the talent management lexicon.
It’s a great term because it encompasses and describes a level of involvement and commitment regardless of the development level or stage that an employee is in. While consulting on Onboarding systems, one of our primary goals is to increase time-to-productivity, but if we want higher levels of productivity, we have to get engagement first. A new hire can be modestly productive without engagement, but that hire won’t reach an optimum level of performance unless that person is truly engaged with their position and your company.
Beyond the Onboarding development phase, engagement is just as important. As we move through our careers, our level of engagement is variable; it waxes and wanes over time. Again we may have employees that are productive, but not engaged. Development opportunities in the form of corporate learning are one tool that talent managers have to re-establish, increase, or maintain engagement throughout the talent life cycle.
Looking back at the conference, it occurs to me that I saw a lot of curriculums designed to address engagement, but the really impressive ones paid as much attention to how the curriculum was delivered as they did to the curriculums themselves. In all cases, engagement programs were not single learning events or courses, but included a series of different kinds of learning opportunities delivered over a period of time. None stated it as such, but the net effect of the approach is the creation of a robust “learning experience.”
The more advanced engagement models also took into account where the employee was in their development within the organization. New employees have very different development needs than top executives, and their motivation and engagement levels will also vary widely. While that is the common-sense practical application of different engagement models for different types of learners and content, it also aligns with commonly accepted theories of employee development stages and talent management cycles.
I’m thinking deeply on how SharePoint-based curriculum frameworks can be targeted and mapped to specific phases in career development and how that can translate into better engagement and better performance. Stay tuned.
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